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University College London
United Kingdom
Post Graduate(PG)
£31,100
1 year
Autumn
English language requirements
Environmental archaeology is an interdisciplinary field encompassing sciences both for fieldwork and in the laboratory, that not only enrich archaeological interpretation but also contribute an archaeological perspective on the long-term legacy of human and environment interactions that have relevance for the future of our planet.
We recognize that the Anthropocene is an epoch in which human actions have become a a geological force influencing climate and biodiversity, but the human behaviours that contribute to these have long histories. Humans have impacted the landscape and environment locally, regionally and perhaps globally, and these effects stretch back to before written records. Environmental archaeology gathers the empirical evidence for how people have used and transformed the environment, including resources from animals and plants, as well as soil and sedimentary systems.
Environmental archaeology works through datasets that are not strictly speaking artefacts but remains of other organisms, soils and sediments, recovered routinely on excavations. Research questions in the field can grouped as addressing issues about focusing food/diet in the past or past land use and landscape reconstruction. This MSc programme addresses these research questions by drawing on research fields of archaeobotany (plants), zooarchaeology (animals) and geoarchaeology (sediments). It stretches across time from early hunter-gatherer societies through domestication and the origins of agriculture, to agricultural intensification, complex societies and world systems. Through the core courses students develop an understanding of formation processes and their implications for developing sampling strategies, and for the critical assessment of environmental archaeology datasets.
In addition, each student gains practical experience in laboratory analysis of at least one of the sub-fields: identification of animal bones, identification of plant macro-remains, or geoarchaeology (micromorphological and sedimentological analyses). They are trained to collect and analyse data in this field, to follow this through labwork and to report scientific results to a high standard.
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